HOW WE DRIVE

HOW WE DRIVE; Roads Are Safer; Cars Are Safer. Drivers? Forget It.

Published: October 10, 2001

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While most drivers are certain that roadways have become riskier, statistics provide good news. The fatality rate on highways measured by deaths per mile driven is consistently decreasing. While roughly 42,000 Americans die in traffic accidents each year, the number of vehicles and miles driven have grown steadily every decade.

This is a source of comfort to some safety experts, who take it as a sign that Americans are somehow managing the frustrations of highway congestion and that their vehicles are offering ever-improving margins of safety.

But it is not a source of comfort to Leonard Evans, a former General Motors safety engineer and the author of the 1991 book ''Traffic Safety and the Driver.''

Dr. Evans, who is the president of the International Traffic Medicine Association, contends that so-called safety devices in cars, particularly air bags, have had an insidious and deadly effect on driver behavior.

He said that as recently as the late 1970's the United States had the safest highways, using the measure of traffic deaths per 100,000 registered vehicles. Today, he said, the United States is in 12th place and sinking.

''If the United States had simply matched Canada's performance over that period,'' Dr. Evans said, ''annual U.S. fatalities this year would be 28,000, rather than more than 41,000.''

He said that since the mid-60's, Americans have spent billions of dollars seeking the perfect technological fix to prevent fatalities. Their solutions, the air bag and other ''passive'' devices, have only compounded the problem. Other industrial nations, Dr. Evans said, have pursued a more balanced approach -- better and earlier driver education, stricter enforcement of traffic and seat-belt laws, use of cameras to detect speeding and red-light running and campaigns against aggressive driving.

''We have just received the wonderful good news that the air bag is killing fewer people than it used to,'' he said. ''When was that an advertisement for a safety device, that it's killing fewer people than it used to?''

DR. EVANS said that the air bag and other safety devices had the same effect collectively as advances in cardiac medicine. Angioplasty and bypass surgery have not decreased the rate of death from heart disease, he said, and might have convinced people that there is a technological ''cure'' for the unhealthy behaviors that lead to heart attacks.

''We see Americans collectively driving a couple of miles an hour faster because of a false sense of safety,'' he said. ''And that collective increase in speed more than washes away the alleged benefit of air bags.''

While the air bag has not proved to be the silver bullet that some technologists envisioned, research continues to explore devices that can prevent accidents or minimize their effects. At the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Washington and at a new simulator laboratory in Iowa, researchers are studying the interaction between driver and machine, seeking to protect drivers from their own mistakes.

One device monitors the operation of the vehicle and uses sensors to alert the car and driver to road conditions. By measuring speed differentials, a computer determines if the vehicle is operating on a crowded freeway, then cuts off cellphone calls or switches off a navigation system, for example.

In another experiment, G.M. has built 10 test cars with sensors in the front bumpers that measure the distance to a vehicle in front. If the driver does not keep a safe distance, the car warns the driver and applies the brakes if he does not slow down.

''Technology is coming into the vehicle, whether we like it or not,'' said Joseph Kanianthra, the director of the office of vehicle safety research at the highway safety agency. ''We're trying to use new technology to minimize the distractions they cause. Our approach is not to take over control of the vehicle altogether, but to provide assistance to the driver, give them a timely warning and maybe even nudge them a bit.''

But Mr. Kanianthra warned that these devices could not replace an attentive driver. And, he added, ''we must always be aware of unintended consequences.''